The new Nobel Prize winner's most famous book

South Korea’s’miracle’ has ghosts. Han Kang portrays them well.

Seoul, with 25 million residents, is the sixth largest metropolitan economy in the world, behind Tokyo, New York, and Los Angeles. It is one of the “most sophisticated” technological, cultural, and economic powers in the world.

It is the most daring modernity turned into a city and nation. Many call it a “miracle”. A miracle with light and shadow when closer.

“I never considered my wife special before she went vegetarian […] She didn’t have any special attractions or defects, so I married her. I felt comfortable in her sober, unfunny, and unattractive manner.”

Han Kang’s best-known novel, ‘The Vegetarian’ begins this way. A “normal” Seoul woman becomes a vegetarian. Despite its triviality, this decision disrupts her social life. Beyond the husband’s insults and scandal, the protagonist’s father hits her to make her eat meat.

Korea can be difficult, but reading from here may seem excessive.

Coexisting nightmare and miracle
South Korea is the OECD country with the most suicides, the highest per capita alcohol consumption, and 3% of its youth locked in their rooms due to a brutal demographic crisis.

Women face up to 80% workplace harassment and a 32% gender gap, making it harder than being a boy. For equal pay, Korea ranks 105 out of 146. Han Kang wrote her book 15 years before 4B, a feminist movement, raised these issues in 2019.

Yeong-hye’s refusal is more subtle than the 4B movement’s four fundamental refusals (“No to heterosexual marriage, no to childbirth and child-rearing, no to dating men, and no to heterosexual relationships”). Meat is more than just meat here.

In a Tim Crouch play, a child decides to always raise his right arm. It’s unclear why and may be bad for him, but it becomes a life purpose that changes him and everyone else. Although the piece is strange, Crouch is English, so we can understand how a small (“incomprehensible”) change in the boy’s social life affects him.

Yeong-hye’s decision is as incomprehensible as Crouch’s to others. Like the play’s arm, her choice “becomes the ultimate inanimate object onto which others project their own symbols and meanings.” The South Korean suffers more.

From the West, the narrators in ‘The Vegetarian’ sound obvious and exaggerated, almost satirical, but this is our problem. Han Kang uses’magical realism’, but Korean society’s misogyny is ‘pure and hard realism’. To understand how ghosts hide behind Seoul’s neon lights, the book is essential.

The new Nobel Prize winner’s most famous book

By knl9j

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